Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

The events at Mount Horeb

4 Now, Israel, in light of all that, listen to the regulations and the case laws that I am teaching you to follow, so that you may live, enter, and possess the land that the Lord, your ancestors’ God, is giving to you. ² Don’t add anything to the word that I am commanding you, and don’t take anything away from it. Instead, keep the commands of the Lord your God that I am commanding all of you.

⁶ Keep them faithfully because that will show your wisdom and insight to the nations who will hear about all these regulations. They will say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and insightful people!” ⁷ After all, is there any great nation that has gods^[a] as close to it as the Lord our God is close to us whenever we call to him? ⁸ Or does any great nation have regulations and case laws as righteous as all this Instruction that I am setting before you today?

⁹ But be on guard and watch yourselves closely so that you don’t forget the things your eyes saw and so they never leave your mind as long as you live. Teach them to your children and your grandchildren.

Psalm 15

A psalm of David.

¹⁷ Every good gift, every perfect gift, comes from above. These gifts come down from the Father, the creator of the heavenly lights, in whose character there is no change at all. ¹⁸ He chose to give us birth by his true word, and here is the result: we are like the first crop from the harvest of everything he created.

Welcoming and doing the word

¹⁹ Know this, my dear brothers and sisters: everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to grow angry. ²⁰ This is because an angry person doesn’t produce God’s righteousness. ²¹ Therefore, with humility, set aside all moral filth and the growth of wickedness, and welcome the word planted deep inside you—the very word that is able to save you.

²² You must be doers of the word and not only hearers who mislead themselves. ²³ Those who hear but don’t do the word are like those who look at their faces in a mirror. ²⁴ They look at themselves, walk away, and immediately forget what they were like. ²⁵ But there are those who study the perfect law, the law of freedom, and continue to do it. They don’t listen and then forget, but they put it into practice in their lives. They will be blessed in whatever they do.

²⁶ If those who claim devotion to God don’t control what they say, they mislead themselves. Their devotion is worthless. ²⁷ True devotion, the kind that is pure and faultless before God the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their difficulties and to keep the world from contaminating us.

What contaminates a life?

7 The Pharisees and some legal experts from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus. ² They saw some of his disciples eating food with unclean hands. (They were eating without first ritually purifying their hands through washing. ³ The Pharisees and all the Jews don’t eat without first washing their hands carefully. This is a way of observing the rules handed down by the elders. ⁴ Upon returning from the marketplace, they don’t eat without first immersing themselves. They observe many other rules that have been handed down, such as the washing of cups, jugs, pans, and sleeping mats.) ⁵ So the Pharisees and legal experts asked Jesus, “Why are your disciples not living according to the rules handed down by the elders but instead eat food with ritually unclean hands?”

⁶ He replied, “Isaiah really knew what he was talking about when he prophesied about you hypocrites. He wrote,

⁸ You ignore God’s commandment while holding on to rules created by humans and handed down to you.”

¹⁴ Then Jesus called the crowd again and said, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand. ¹⁵ Nothing outside of a person can enter and contaminate a person in God’s sight; rather, the things that come out of a person contaminate the person.”^[a]

²¹ “It’s from the inside, from the human heart, that evil thoughts come: sexual sins, thefts, murders, ²² adultery, greed, evil actions, deceit, unrestrained immorality, envy, insults, arrogance, and foolishness. ²³ All these evil things come from the inside and contaminate a person in God’s sight.”